Erwin Tegtmeier
The title of the
book announces a systematic metaphysics. Formerly that would have been pleonastic but these days it is
remarkable since the metaphysics of mainstream analytical philosophy is mostly
rudimentary and unsystematic. There are a few systematic metaphysicians but they
are unpopular and widely ignored. Traditionally
a metaphysical or ontological system is a tree of categories and subcategories.
Then there is a theory about connections between entities and complexes of entities which takes into account their categories.
The system has to be comprehensive, i.e., each phenomenon in the world
has to be classifiable and analysable with those categories which is not as
easy as it sounds.
Thus we have to
look at Armstrong’s tree of categories in this book. It seems that Armstrong
has two highest categories below the category of existent: particulars and
universals. He even seems to take for granted that any existent must be either
a particular or a universal implying that this must hold in any ontology. In
Russell’s ontology of 1918 as well as in the ontology of Gustav Bergmann who
continued Russell’s Logical Atomism the
category of facts is co-ordinated with the categories of particulars and
universals with the consequence that facts are neither particulars nor
universals. There is even a stark contrast between particulars and universals
on the one hand and facts on the other. The former are simple while the latter
are complex. Armstrong earlier did not bother about bringing together simples
(so-called “thin particulars”) and complexes (facts) in one and the same
category. The former are no longer mentioned in the book. Now, If the category
of fact is subcategory of the category of particulars then all facts have to be
particulars and there have to be some particulars which are not facts.
Armstrong’s former thin particulars were such particulars. It seems that his
facts consist ultimately only of universals. That was actually Russell’s later
view which is sometimes called “the bundle view” because ordinary objects are
ontologically analysed as bundles of universals. Armstrong refers to it without
identifying it as Russell’s later view. Armstrong had mentioned earlier (p.13 )
that Russell in his later years
adopted the bundle theory but he seems not to realise that the quotation by
which he supports his view that facts are particulars is an expression of that
bundle theory. Armstrong had rejected the bundle theory at that place. He
contrasts bundle and attribute theory and subscribes to the latter emphasising
that particulars have properties (universals) rather than consisting of them. However,
if thin particulars are dropped Armstrong inevitably ends up in the bundle
theory.
There is a
chapter headed “particulars” but its subject is not the comprehensive category
of particulars which includes facts, nor is the subject thin particulars but
only ordinary persistent and changing objects. Clearly, Armstrong analyses
these objects as complexes, not as thin particulars. Hence, they should be
members of the category of facts. Moreover, in the absence of thin particulars
all particular are facts and the categories of particulars and facts coincide.
The particular
chapter deals also with the identity of changing objects. Armstrong adopts an
18th Century distinction between strict and loose identity and he
argues that the identity over time and change is only loose identity. Since loose identity is opposed to strict
identity it implies the negation of strict identity. Strict identity holds only
between an existent and itself. Does Armstrong then think that changing objects are not
strictly identical with themselves though they are existents? He seems to adopt
the view of Berkeley and Hume that changing objects are series rather than
simple substances. However, not only simple but also complex entities are
self-identical, i.e. strictly identical with themselves. In Berkeley and Hume
the nature of complex entities is not clear but the implication is that they do not exist. The point of the Empiricist and
presumably also Armstrong’s view is that series do not exist. Series are not
recognized as entities by the Empiricists because their ontology is
fundamentally reist. Armstong’s ontology is officially anti-reist in that it is
an ontology in which facts play a central role, as he frequently emphasises. Such
ontologies can acknowledge series by analysing them as facts.
It turned out
that the issue here is existence, not identity. Existence and ontological
status is certainly not the strength of Armstrong’s metaphysics. Armstrong
plays with existence and existents proclaiming that a lot of existents
supervene and are therefore, as he expresses himself, “free lunches”. “They do
not add to being” as he likes to say. How can an existent not contribute to
being though it is a being (existent)?
Should they not be considered then rather as non-existents? If one takes
“add to being” in the arithmetical sense one could think of them as
zero-existents, so to speak, existent without numerical identity. That would
also lead to absurdity.
Armstrong’s
supervenience-gambit reminds of the Medieval concept of transcendentals. It is highly problematic if it is not
restricted to fundamental phenomena such as sameness and existence. The extensive use of the
transcendentals move gives rise to severe difficulties. If the difference of
two existents as well as their mereological whole are assumed, as is done by
Armstrong, as no additions to being, they ground ontologically on those two
entities and nothing else and would be indistinguishable. Therefore, one can
argue that they ground one transcendental and only one and difference and
mereological whole should not be two and differ. Armstrong generous use of the
supervenients proves mistaken.
Armstrong seems always happy
to find non-entities and may feel in accord with Occam’s principle of parsimony.
But too much parsimony is disastrous.
In the Middle Ages more and more of the Aristotelian categories were
construed as transcendentals because they turned out to be relational and
because the Aristotelian ontology never was hospitable to relations. Aristotle
grants them only the lowest ontological status. Now, the ontological status of
transcendentals was elusive. That is why Occam took the epistemological turn
and declared that they are merely concepts in the mind. Occam’s conclusion led
to representationalism and finally to idealism.
In the Preface Armstrong draws attention to the
introduction of truthmaking theory as an important revision of his ontology (p.
IX). With respect to truthmaking Armstrong assumes propositions as truth
bearers. But their ontological status and categorisation is unclear. He traces
them back to mind. In a footnote on
p.17 he writes: “I connect propositions with intentionality, and thus with
mind. I do not think there is an ontological realm of propositions as some
philosophers do.” It reveals a representationalist tendency that Armstrong
attributes modalities to propositions rather than to facts.
One may doubt
that Armstrong’s is really a fact ontology as he claims. In Russell facts are
the crucial category because they adopt the role particulars had in the
tradition. This move is not possible for Armstrong because he takes facts to be
particulars. He cites approvingly Wittgenstein’s statement that the world is
the totality of facts not of things. But this does not make sense in his
ontology in which facts are things (particulars). He hails this even as the
triumph of particularity, a phrase which may summarise the triumph of
Aristotelian ontologies which are definitely ontologies without facts. They are
reistic ontologies with particulars as the only full-blown beings.
There is no hint
in Armstrong’s book concerning the category to which propositions belong or, if
they form a category of their own, as to the category of which propositions are
a subcategory. It seems that Armstrong does not take propositions to be linguistic
entities. He writes: “I identify propositions as what is believed, what is
supposed, entertained, doubted, etc. “ and “There is something abstract about
propositions ...” (p.65). Armstrong considers Russell as the originator of
truthmaker theory. In Russell propositions are also truth-bearers but they are
linguistic entities. They are statements.
In Russell’s 1918 paper The
Philosophy of Logical Atomism to which Armstrong frequently adjoins a proposition
is “a sentence in the indicative” and Russell holds that what is believed,
supposed etc. are facts.
Armstrong also
wants to continue Russell’s Logical Atomism in chapter 10 headed “Limits” where
he mainly deals with Russell’s general facts. However, Armstrong’s general
states of affairs are very different from Russell’s. The consequences of his
categorising states of affairs as particulars appear. “All the persons in the
room now” is for Armstrong an instance of what he calls “a totality states of
affairs” (p.75). For Russell only a complete sentence represents a fact. The sentence:
“all the persons in this room are Australians”, for example, would represent a
general fact.
Russell had
objected to Wittgenstein’s reduction of general facts to conjunctions of
particular facts that the reduction would not be successful because it does not
imply that the conjuncts are all the relevant particular facts. Now, it is far
from Russell to reduce general facts to conjunctions of particular facts with a
that-is-all clause. Rather, he takes the general quantifier to be a formal
constituent of general facts. By contrast, Armstrong tries to make ontological
sense of the phrases “all” and equivalently “no more”. He distinguishes the intension of a
totality state of affairs which is a property and the extension of it which
Armstrong takes to be mereological sum and suggests thinking of that state of
affairs as “cutting the mereological sum up without remainder” (p.79). Then he
considers it as a relation holding between the property and the mereological
sum. That would be a Russellian fact but not a general fact. Rather it would be
in Russell a particular relational fact. Armstrong notes that the intension of a
totality states of affairs is a property but not a universal which leaves it
without categorisation in his ontology. Moreover, he explains that those states
of affairs are “not additions to being” (p. 79).
Gustav Bergmann
argued that the gist of representationalism is the assumption of a third kind
of entities which are neither physical nor mental and function as representatives
of the proper objects of knowledge. Armstrong’s propositions clearly are neither
physical nor mental. They are contrasted by Armstrong with the real (p. 62)
hence considered to be non-real. Moreover, propositions are not put into any of
the categories. However, it seems at first that Armstrong does not fit into
Bergmann’s genetic explanation of representationalism. Bergmann claims that the
trend towards representationalism stems from a rejection of universals, from
the lack of fundamental ties between particulars and universals and from the
rejection of facts. Armstrong notes that in this book he assumes fundamental
ties for the first time and as far as universals and facts are concerned he had
advocated them for a long time. However, his universals are extraordinary. They
are localised and characterised as repeatables which is contradictory since it
implies that they are one but also more than one. Armstrong’s facts are also extraordinary in that they are
categorised, as was mentioned already, as particulars.
According to
Bergmann, the representatives serve as bearers of features of the world which
the respective ontology cannot cope with. That is just what Armstrong’s
propositions do. They not only bear the property of truth but also modalities
such as necessity and possibility. Most revealing is Armstrong’s explanation of
propositions which implies that beliefs, suppositions etc. are not directed to
facts but to propositions as their representatives. What allows Armstrong to get
along with much fewer entities is his relation of truthmaking between existents
and propositions. In contrast to the intentional relation of Bergmann which is
one-one it is a many-one relation. Thus the same existent can make several
different propositions true. He registers that reduction of existents in two
principles: the entailment principle and the possibility principle. The former
(p.65) says that the truthmaker of a proposition makes also its logically
entailed propositions true. The latter claims that the truthmakers of a
contingent proposition is also the truthmaker of the possibility of its falsity
and Armstrong thinks that he can by this principle avoid any assumption
possibilia. Strictly speaking, the entailment principle excludes the ontologisation
of logical constants. Nevertheless, he wants to have entities with logical
constants such as conjunctive universals (p. 29).
The theory of truthmakers
was originally developed to loosen the connection between statement and stated
such that the stated need not be a fact. Thus it was designed to be able to
dispense with facts. According to this theory even single tropes can make a statement
true. Correspondingly, in Armstrong many truthmakers of propositions are not states
of affairs though officially his world is a world of states affairs.
It supports the
diagnosis of representationalism that Armstrong views mathematics and logic as
rational disciplines that deals with true propositions which are necessary and
discovered a priori. (p.88). He also characterises mathematics as the science
of structures without making clear to what category structures belongs. Since
he talks about the instantiation of structures they may be categorised as
universals. The structural view of mathematics is very common but it separates
mathematics and its application leads into difficulties in Armstrong’s ontology
because he advocates the principle that all universals have to be instantiated.
Armstrong tries to solve the
difficulties by drawing on his theory of possibilities and taking the uninstantiated
structures to be involved in possibilities.
In view of the
title of the book one misses in large parts of the book the categorisations
since the first question of the ontologist/systematic metaphysician is always,
as we saw: what category does it belong to? In the short chapter on time for
example the fundamental ontological alternative of relationism versus
absolutism does not appear at all. Rather Armstrong discusses the issue of time
in terms of the rather un-ontological and coarse classification of mainstream
analytic philosophy. The criterion of that classification is whether only the
present or also the past or also the future is taken to be real. It is not
related to the categorisation of time.
In his summary
of the whole book Armstrong emphasises as its main points that the world “is a
structure of contingent states of affairs”, that states of affairs types have
to be introduced and also negativity but not as absences (by which he means
Russell’s negative facts) but as limits (i.e., as his totality states of
affairs). Nevertheless, the
categorisation of structures is unclear. In the chapter on states of affairs
there is talk of structural universals (p.29) but that cannot be what he means
since he explicitly holds that the world is a particular (p.28). The concept of
absences which he adopts from someone else (p.74) is highly misleading here
since not only “there is no elephant in the zoo” represents a negative fact
according to Russell but also “the elephant is not blue”. Moreover, It is unclear to which of
Armstrong’s categories the types of state of affairs belong. Armstrong’s
schematisation of them makes them look like Russellian propositional functions.
What is clear is that they are not universals, which were his original relata
of the relation ‘causes’ and which led into the difficulty that particular
instances of a causal law could not be logially derived. Obviously, in
Armstrong they cannot be particulars either.
